Hellfire – Princess of Hell

The second bathroom had a frosted window above the cistern and a crack in the grout running diagonally from the tap. I crouched on the tile, drew the circle in three minutes, and watched the indicator pull toward the same fixed point it had in the first.

Either my methodology was flawed, or the answer was genuinely there, and something beneath that warehouse was eating my spells before they could resolve cleanly. The leylines Valerian mentioned were the obvious candidate. Whether that meant my body was inside the interference radius or simply that the leylines were scrambling my results from any anchor point in the city, I had no way to determine without knowing where else in London those lines converged.

Charles would know. Miriam might know. Asking either of them would produce questions I couldn’t answer without explaining why I was tracking a specific human with what was clearly not standard localisation magic.

So. Daniel would look. Daniel was good at looking.

I wiped the circle with a square of tissue, dropped it in the bin, and went back out into the afternoon.

I walked for most of it. South along the river for a while, then east, then doubling back through streets I remembered as Liam and navigated without effort as Lily, heels finding the uneven paving automatically. The city looked the same. It smelled the same—diesel and river and the particular damp of a cloudy September. A month ago I had lived here. Taken the tube, bought coffee, argued with the self-checkout at the corner Tesco.

I didn’t feel like a tourist exactly. More like someone revisiting a city they’d moved away from: familiar enough for comfort, far enough removed that the familiarity had acquired a slight melancholy edge.

I arrived at the meeting point first and put my back against the wall.

A group of men slowed as they passed. One of them held eye contact a beat longer than necessary. I watched them go with the same mild attention I’d give a passing car and looked back at the street.

Isabella came from the north, silver hair caught against her dark coat, carrying herself with the particular quality of someone who had found the weekend entirely satisfactory.

I pushed off the wall.

“You look pleased with yourself.”

“I found a hotel.” She settled beside me, not quite close enough to crowd. “The mortals were approaching without prompting. Crude compared to trained ones, but there is something to be said for enthusiasm in the untrained.” A slight pause. “Most of them knew their place without instruction.”

“Most.”

“One required a demonstration.” She glanced at me. “How did you fare?”

“I found a vampire den. Whole operation running out of a warehouse.” I watched a pigeon negotiate a dropped chip wrapper. “Wasn’t bored.”

“A vampire den.” Her eyes moved to me with the attentiveness that meant she was cataloguing rather than merely listening. “Was it productive?”

“Interesting, at minimum.”

She weighed that and apparently decided to let it settle rather than press it. One of the things I’d learned to appreciate about her.

Then Aria’s voice arrived before Aria did, singing something tuneless around the corner, and she appeared with two shopping bags swinging from each fist and a third looped over her elbow, grinning at full candlepower.

My hand found the ring on my finger.

The gesture was complete before I’d made any decision about it—a reflex, or something adjacent to one. I already knew we were going to end up at a storage problem within thirty seconds.

Aria spotted us, broke into a jog, and arrived in a small collision of bags and jasmine.

I opened the ring’s pocket dimension and held my hand out.

“By the hells.” She loaded bags in with both arms. “Lily, you are literally the best. I kept thinking my fingers were going to fall off—”

* * *

Aria dropped the last bag into the ring and flexed her fingers dramatically, examining them like she’d survived something.

“Okay so,” she started, shifting her weight from one hip to the other, “the first day was a nightmare, like the streets go in completely the wrong directions and nobody would just tell you where anything was, they’d just point and keep walking—”

“You managed,” Isabella said.

“Obviously I managed, I’m just saying it was hard initially.” She waved this away. “But then I found my feet, totally figured out the vibe, and there was this dance club—nowhere near as good as the Den, like not even close; the music was mid, and nobody knew how to move—but I found a group, eight of them to start, and then.” She grinned. “You know how it goes.”

“How many total?” I said.

“Twenty-four.” She said it the way someone might describe a particularly satisfying meal.

Twenty-four. I processed that. Then the other side of the calculation presented itself without invitation—faces from the nightclub booth, the mezzanine, the back of the floor, names I’d learned and forgotten and learned again. Thomas. Harper. The two women whose names I’d never caught. Valerian, twice. Julian.

The faces kept coming.

I kept my expression where it was.

“Twenty-one.” Isabella let the number land without preamble. “The hotel proved more efficient than anticipated.”

“Even Isabella,” I said. Which wasn’t really a sentence, but it completed itself.

Aria pointed at her. “Ha. I’m still better.”

“By three.”

“Three is three.”

They both looked at me.

I became very interested in a point slightly past Aria’s left shoulder.

“Lily.” Aria’s tail curved toward me. “Come on, don’t keep us in suspense.”

“I, um.” The words arranged themselves badly. “I lost count.”

Two beats of silence.

“Sorry,” Aria said. “You what?”

“Lost count.” My hand found the strap of my bag out of pure reflex. “I lost count.”

“You’re not just saying that to dodge the punishment?” Aria’s eyes narrowed, though her mouth was already pulling toward a grin. “Because that would be very clever and also very you.”

I put my face in both hands. The cool of my own palms was grounding. “I’m not lying.”

“Then—”

“After about thirty I stopped keeping track.”

The silence this time had a different texture.

“Thirty.” Aria’s voice climbed. “In two days?”

I kept my face where it was. “One night, technically.”

I heard Aria make a sound that was somewhere between a shriek and a laugh. “You—one—Lily, you absolute—”

“I need details.” She grabbed my wrist and pulled my hands away from my face. Her eyes were enormous. “Right now. How, when, where, all of it. Start from the beginning.”

“Aria—”

“Don’t Aria me, you just admitted you lost count after thirty—”

“It wasn’t—” I stopped. Started again. Isabella’s expression had shifted about two degrees, which on her was the equivalent of leaning forward in her seat. Even she wanted to know.

“Fine.” I exhaled. “Fine. So.”

I turned slightly, resettling my weight, buying half a second.

“It started with a taxi.”

* * *

Aria’s face cycled through three expressions while I talked—delight, disbelief, something approaching reverence—and when I finished she sat with her mouth open for a full second.

“No,” Aria said when I finished. “No, absolutely not. You’re lying.”

“I’m not.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“No.”

“Aria.”

“That is—” she grabbed my arm with both hands, “—that is so unfair, you just stumbled in there, like you didn’t even plan it—”

“I didn’t stumble.”

“—and you didn’t even tell us—”

“I’m telling you now.”

“That’s not the same!” She released me, threw her hands up. “Next time we go, you’re taking us. Both of us. I want to meet this Valerian, and that Medric person sounds—” She made a sound I couldn’t transcribe. “I just. I need that in my life.”

“Noted.”

She swung toward Isabella. “Still beat you, though.”

“You beat me by three.” Isabella’s tone was the kind of flat that takes practice. “In a city we’re still learning to navigate. So yes. Congratulations on your three.”

“Quality doesn’t win competitions, Bella.”

“It does. Consistently. Just not this one.”

Aria stuck her tongue out. Isabella’s expression didn’t change by so much as a muscle, which was its own form of victory.

Then Aria turned back to me, and the grin she was wearing had a specific quality I’d learned to recognise.

“So,” she said. “What’s Isabella’s punishment? And—” she held up one finger, preemptive, “—please make it something funny. Also, can I participate?”

“You haven’t given me a second to think about it.”

“You’ve had this whole conversation to think about it.”

“I was busy recounting thirty-plus—”

“So you do remember.”

I closed my mouth.

Aria pressed both palms together. “Whatever you decide, please include me. Please. I’m asking very nicely.”

“You’re not, actually.”

“I am internally.” She leaned in. “Please. Please. Please.”

I exhaled through my nose. “Fine.”

The sound she made could have woken the street.

Isabella caught my eye over Aria’s shoulder. One corner of her mouth moved a fraction, gone before it fully arrived—acknowledgement, shared and dry.

“Alright,” I said, cutting across Aria’s celebration before it could develop further. “We still have time before we need to be back. What do we do with it?”

Aria stopped mid-bounce.

She appeared to think about this for nearly three seconds before the question ceased to matter to her.

“Okay so, speaking of things I couldn’t carry—” She started walking, gesturing for us to follow. “There was this shop, three streets back from where I found the second group, and the window had this jacket, black leather, and I couldn’t buy it because I had nowhere to put it, which is criminal, and then down from that there were these boots—not like the ones I got, different, taller, with the buckles up the side—and a scarf, which I know sounds boring but it was this dark red, almost burgundy—”

Isabella fell into step beside me.

I matched her pace.

“Come on then,” I said to Aria. “Show me.”

* * *

The bags went into the ring two blocks out—Aria’s jacket and the tall boots with the buckles, Isabella’s two carefully chosen items, my own additions—and by the time the AOR building came into view we were three women with empty hands and nothing to declare.

Aria looked down at herself, then back at the ring on my finger.

“It’s genuinely tragic,” she said. “That jacket is perfect, and I can’t wear it anywhere in Gehenna without it catching fire.”

“You could wear it in the lower levels.”

“The lower levels are boring.” She fell into step between us. “The jacket deserves better than boring.” A pause. “Maybe I’ll wear it to class.”

“Professor Auriel will ask where you got it.”

“I’ll tell her the mortal realm. She’ll be appalled. I’ll enjoy that.”

We were four minutes early. The door opened before I reached for it.

The woman who met us wasn’t Charles. She was somewhere in her forties, dark suit, lanyard tucked behind her lapel. She held the door and didn’t introduce herself, which meant she expected us to know what the lanyard represented.

Aria looked past her shoulder.

“Where’s Charles?”

“Occupied.” She stepped back to let us through. “He’ll join you shortly.”

“Aww.”

The woman’s expression didn’t shift. She turned and led us toward the elevator, heels on concrete in a precise, unhurried rhythm. The lobby looked the same as it had Friday—the same desk, the same flat lighting, one more agent than before standing near the far wall.

“I hope your visit to London—” The woman pressed the call button and looked at the closed doors. “—turned out to be.” A pause. “Fun.”

“Not boring,” Isabella said.

The elevator arrived. We stepped in.

Aria’s shoulder was warm against mine in the enclosed space. She was doing the small weight-shift thing, the one she did when she was trying not to bounce.

“Are you certain you don’t want to summon us again next week?” Aria asked the woman’s profile. “We’re quite good at pest control. Very reasonable rates.”

“Your classification is still under review.” The woman watched the floor counter. “Following the incident. So while we appreciate the enthusiasm, that decision is above my level.” A pause. “You were all reasonably contained this visit. Nothing that required intervention.”

I watched the numbers.

“That said.” The woman’s eyes moved to me, briefly. Just a glance, cataloguing. “Your colleague appears to have made a detour on Friday evening. Either that, or she spent the better part of two hours with a taxi driver.”

The elevator hummed.

Aria and Isabella both turned to look at me. Aria’s expression was somewhere between impressed and deeply amused. Isabella’s was nothing, which was worse.

“He was—” I cleared my throat. “Particularly good company. I lost track of time.”

The woman held my gaze for a moment. Whatever she was measuring, she finished measuring it.

“Nothing flagged during the interval,” she said. “So.”

The elevator stopped.

The doors opened onto the familiar concrete of the underground corridor—low ceiling, strip lighting, the faint mineral smell of old stone and recent chalk. One of the agents from before was already down here, moving ahead of us toward the far passage.

The woman stepped out first and half-turned, one hand indicating the direction.

“If you’ll follow me.”

* * *

The chamber looked the same. Torch brackets, carved stone, chalk lines over the top of older marks. The two suited observers had been replaced by three different ones who stood at the same careful distance, hands in the same carefully neutral positions. Either the AOR issued a posture handbook, or these specific jobs attracted a particular type.

Aria made it thirty seconds before she started shifting her weight from foot to foot.

“Are we just standing here?”

“Charles will be a few minutes.” The woman gestured toward the chalk. “You can begin preparing.”

“Preparing what? We step in a circle. There’s nothing to prepare.” Aria turned to Isabella. “Can’t we just—go? Do it ourselves?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

Isabella considered the question with the patience of someone who had already decided how long this conversation would take. “Charles anchors us here. The summoning is keyed specifically to him. Without that anchor, the spell has nothing to resolve against.”

Aria’s tail flicked. “So we’re just… attached to him?”

“In the relevant sense.”

“Huh.” She seemed to sit with that. “That actually explains a lot. I kept feeling this pull toward him, and I thought it was just because he’s kind of distinguished-looking in that tired way, but—”

I hadn’t felt anything. Though with Aria, the distinction between genuine supernatural sensitivity and Aria being Aria was a line I’d stopped trying to locate.

“The alternative,” Isabella continued, “is banishment. Which is not a comfortable process.”

“How not comfortable?”

“Unpleasantly so.”

Aria looked at the circle. Then at the passage entrance. Then at the circle again.

“Fine.”

Footsteps on the stairs. Charles came through the passage with Miriam half a step behind him, her blazer immaculate despite the hour, glasses catching the torchlight.

“Finally.” Aria’s weight came forward.

“You hadn’t even started waiting yet,” I said.

“Details.”

She lifted a hand toward Charles in a wave that somehow managed to carry a suggestion.

“Morning.” Her voice dropped into a register she hadn’t been using thirty seconds ago. “We were starting to wonder.”

Charles cleared his throat. The sound of a man who had encountered this particular frequency before and was choosing not to engage with it. “I hope the trip proved worthwhile.”

“I’d still say yes to you,” Aria said. “On the record.”

A long breath out through his nose. He reached into his jacket. “Are you ready?”

We looked at each other. Isabella gave a small nod. Aria was already stepping into the chalk circle.

“Ready,” I said.

Charles uncapped the dark staff from wherever he kept it and moved to his position. The chalk lines began to respond, a faint luminescence running the outer ring.

The silhouette at the top of the stairs appeared.

Heels on concrete, quick and certain.

“Tess.” A voice I knew. “Still don’t know why HSU needs information on vampires, but I got the documents you wanted.”

Faith came through the passage with a folder under one arm and her eyes already moving to the woman who’d been managing us all morning. She hadn’t looked at the circle yet. The report had her attention, flipped open now, one finger tracking a line of text.

Charles completed his first gesture. The chalk flared.

Faith’s head came up.

Her eyes found mine across the chamber in the half-second before the light took everything.

* * *

The dorm hit me first as heat—the specific, dry warmth of Gehenna radiating up through the stone floor, through the soles of my shoes, settling into my bones. After two days of London’s damp grey chill, it felt almost indecent how good it was.

Aria spread her arms wide and inhaled through her nose, long and deliberate, like she was tasting the air.

“Fuuuck.” She let the breath out. “I forgot what it smelled like. Like, I knew I missed it, but I didn’t know I missed it.”

She dropped the glamour. Black horns curved back from her forehead, tail swinging loose behind her, and she rolled her shoulders as her undersized wings stretched and folded again.

I let mine go next. The tension I’d been maintaining dissolved in the space of a breath—the constant low-level compression of keeping everything tucked, everything small, everything human. My wings spread to their full span, caught the warm air, and I pulled them in slow.

Isabella stood beside me, already herself again, her obsidian wings folded against her back. Her tail traced one slow arc and stilled.

“That,” Aria announced to no one, “is so much better.”

The bathroom door stood open. Aria pivoted toward it and raised her voice.

“Bellas! We’re home. Draw us a bath, would you?”

A pause, then the sound of bare feet on stone.

Bellas appeared in the doorway, composed and unhurried, inclining his head toward Aria.

“As you wish, Mistress.” He turned back into the bathroom, and a moment later water thundered against marble.

Aria flopped backwards onto the nearest bed with her wings half-spread, tail curling contentedly around the bedpost. Isabella watched her with the expression she reserved for things she found predictable and fond in equal measure.

“I’ll pass.”

Aria lifted her head. “On the bath?”

“On the bath.” Isabella retrieved her coat from the chair where she’d folded it two days ago. “I have to go back.”

“We just got here.”

“Which is precisely why.” She smoothed a crease from the lapel that wasn’t there. “I’ve been absent for two days. There are things that require attention.”

Aria propped herself up on her elbows. “You and your responsibilities.” She flopped back down. “Fine. Fine. But you’re aware this means Lily and I have entire day to come up with a punishment for you. Uninterrupted.”

The corner of Isabella’s mouth moved. Not a smile, exactly. The controlled cousin of one. “I would expect nothing less.”

She collected the rest of her things with the efficiency of someone who’d already decided the length of every remaining interaction. At the door she paused, turned back, and her eyes moved between us once—something precise and warm in it, gone before it fully arrived.

Then the door closed.

Aria stared at the ceiling for a moment.

“She’s going to make us work for it, you know. Whatever we come up with, she’ll find a loophole.”

Steam had started drifting through the bathroom doorway, curling against the room's cooler air. The smell of it—hot water and the faint mineral edge of Gehenna’s pipes—settled over everything.

I peeled off my jacket and dropped it over the desk chair.

“Then we’ll have to be thorough.”

Aria was already moving, tail unwinding from the bedpost, wings tucking as she headed for the bathroom. She glanced back at me over her shoulder, grinning.

“See, that’s what I’m talking about.” She disappeared through the doorway. “You’re getting better at this.”

Aria moved toward the bathroom, pulling her top over her head as she went. Steam drifted through the gap Bellas had left in the door.

“Coming?”

“Give me a minute.”

She disappeared inside. I heard her greet Bellas with something that made him laugh, quiet and startled, before the sound of water swallowed it.

I slipped the jacket from my shoulders and tucked it into the ring, then looked at nothing in particular for a moment.

Faith’s face. The exact half-second before the chalk flared. Her eyes crossing the chamber and landing on mine with the particular stillness of someone whose instincts had just caught something their brain hadn’t processed yet.

She’d been looking straight at me.

Whether she’d actually seen me or whether the light had swallowed it before the image resolved, I didn’t know. The circle hadn’t given me time to read her expression past the first beat of recognition.

Or what might have been recognition.

The water in the next room was very loud.

I pulled the ring from my finger, set it on the desk, and went to find out if the bath was large enough to stop thinking for twenty minutes.

* * *

The bath had fixed most of it. Whatever residual tension the London trip had left in my shoulders, the heat pulled out of me over the course of an hour while Aria narrated her entire weekend in sequence, including a detailed account of an accountant named Steven who had, apparently, cried afterwards in a way she found charming.

I’d slept like something dead.

Now we were walking toward the main building and the morning felt aggressively ordinary—the familiar sulfur-warm air, the other students moving in clusters around the courtyard, the distant sound of someone in the combat building catching a correction from an instructor. Aria had her arm through mine and was bouncing slightly with each step, which she always did when anticipating something.

“I’m just saying,” she said, “Isabella’s going to make a face. You know the face. The one where she’s pretending she doesn’t have a face.”

“She’s going to find a loophole.”

“She can try.” Aria squeezed my arm. “You didn’t have to go that hard on the punishment though. Like, genuinely. I was going to suggest something way more reasonable.”

“You suggested she spend a full afternoon narrating her own victories to us, while touching herself.”

“Which is funny. Yours is just—” she made a gesture that communicated both admiration and mild distress. “A lot.”

“She’ll manage.”

Next week’s Practice of the Flesh syllabus had been posted that morning. Kamasutra, a full semester unit, two practical sessions per week. A month ago, that sentence would have provoked some internal resistance worth examining. Now it registered roughly the same as noting that Alchemy had moved to Thursday. After a den in London and everything that preceded it, the curriculum felt like revision.

I noticed Valentina before she spoke—her and two others rounding the corner from the pureblood block, falling into step without hurrying, the arrangement that made corridor navigation feel like yield protocol.

Neither had distinguished themselves beyond reliable attendance.

“If it isn’t the commoner.” Valentina’s voice had the particular quality of someone who had rehearsed casualness. “And her pet.”

Aria’s chin came up. “Are you the pet here? You’re the one who came trotting over.”

Valentina’s eyes moved to her for one flat second, then back to me. The dismissal was so complete it was almost a technique.

“What do you want, Valentina?”

It wasn’t really a question. She heard that.

“Nothing from you.” A pause, measured to land. “Only—don’t mistake the fact that you eat out that Lilitu girl for any kind of protection. It would be unfortunate if you overestimated your position.”

The corridor was quiet enough that Mob A’s intake of breath was audible.

“Is that a threat?”

“It’s a statement of fact.” Her expression didn’t change. “I’d hate for you to read something into it that isn’t there.”

She held the look for another beat, then continued past us, her two shadows falling in behind her without breaking stride.

Aria watched them go. Her shoulder was pressed against mine.

“That was—”

“She’s posturing.” I shifted my bag and turned east again. “The more you react, the more she does it. Come on, it’s Maths.”

Aria made a sound like a small, personal tragedy. “Why would you remind me?”

“Because you’re going to be late regardless and at least this way it’s intentional.”

She fell into step beside me, already pulling her notebook out and dangling it from two fingers, resigned. The corridor opened into the wider atrium, other students crossing in clusters, and Aria leaned her head briefly against my shoulder as we walked.

“You’re my least favourite person right now.”

“I know.”